The effect of category-size and experimental context on semantic congruity in semantic verification task
Stanislava Antonijević · Psihologija · 2000
The work presented here examined the category-size effect in a sentence verification task. Six experiments were conducted in which pairs of categories of different size were contrasted. These categories were members of the superordinate categories of 'animal' or 'geography'. This experimental design enabled the additional examination of the context effect, revealed from the pairwise comparisons of category-size. Analyses of variance indicated that the category-size effect influenced the effect of semantic congruity between the instance and the category within particular categories. In other to compare this effect for all categories in each experiment, regression analyses were performed in which the effects of semantic congruity were contrasted with: a) category size, b) the proportion of category sizes and c) category size weighted by the proportion of category sizes. The results indicated that category size weighted by the proportion of category sizes provides the best prediction of semantic-congruity effect variability and that this relationship is logarithmic.